Taken between two fires, the Crows felt they had lost the day. The Bois Brulés, without wasting time in seeking whence were their timely deliverers, shouted "Vive la Canadienne!" and bravely took the offensive. But, casting aside their empty guns, the Crows scattered through the camp, and tried to scramble out of the environment with even more alacrity than they had shown in entering. Shot down by the unknown foe and cut to pieces by the reanimated Half-breeds—it was a "fix." Weaponless, stripped almost naked for the action, debarred from speeding to the spot where their garments were stored, the Indians must have been slaughtered to a man on the frigid waste had not their frantic appeals to the patron of their tribe seemed to have obtained an intervention.
That storm which had been two days breeding, and was unmistakably threatened overnight, flew over the mountain crest and burst on the tablelands with unmeasured violence. It was the "blizzard," to which East Indian cyclones, West Indian tornadoes, and what Europe calls tempests, are zephyrs to fan a baby's brow. One of those cataclysms which befall poor earth as if destined to destroy it, and rage in the desert so furiously that the aspect of the whole tract for thousands upon thousands of miles is often transformed in a few hours. The wind came out of gorges like a compacted bolt, and basalt was pierced like putty; the eddies, or "screw wind," uprooted hoary pines and waltzed away with them in the distance. The snow and hail clouds were compressed to the tree and hill tops, and condensed the lower atmosphere so that breathing was difficult, and cattle stopped in frantic flight as if a colossal hand were laid on their backs. The snow fell in balled up masses, and light absolutely disappeared so far as any ability to fix its source existed. All the eye could perceive was a variation in the density of the seams of gloom. As for hearing, any one of the portentous sounds must have deafened—the roar of the wind, the crash of the dethroned peaks, the ripping of the trees, the rush of the avalanches of snow, sand, and rocks.
The Indians had scattered over the plain, trembling and moaning their prayers indiscriminately to the Great Good Spirit and the Little Bad One. On they fled, trampling on birds and beasts, whose lifelong lairs and nests were wrecked, and which grovelled flat in agony of apprehension. Most dreadful of all, now and then a fugitive was balled up in a thick gust, and the packing flakes around him rapidly gathering additional layers, he was soon thrown down, and thence forth, the core of a rolling hill spun on for leagues over the tablelands.
Ridge had time to raise the cry, "With me, on our only chance, boys!" and by a miracle, blindly, yet surely, led the band back to their late post, however precarious was that refuge, attained over new and terrible obstacles in the thick snow.
The lately smooth-as-glass beaver meadow lake was rough with stones that had smashed the mirror; the subterranean stream, vastly swollen, rose up like an entombed snake, bursting the surface and splashed about impetuously for outlets which continual changes of the rocky barriers offered and withdrew. As the torrent rose to the hunters, the snow massively came down. But they were hardened border men, and far from letting even justifiable awe paralyse their courage, arched their backs against the piercing north wind, and listened to judge by its sinister voice where would open an escape from the enwrapping danger.
Fortunately, the very violence of these Rocky Mountain snowstorms lessen their duration, and they calm down more rapidly than they break out—suddenly and without a warning lull. This the adventurers knew, except Filditch and Ranald alone, perhaps, and though they were knee deep in icy water and mere snowmen, they dwelt statuesque without a murmur.
During three hours they huddled up, clinging to each other, merely shifting, so that every now and then the more exposed should be replaced by the best sheltered—a living bulwark, that built and unbuilt itself for its own protection.
"Hurrah, boys!" shouted the Yager, as the wind died away sharply, "We have weathered it. Old Rocky is some, though, when he pitches snowballs!"
The snowflakes were soft at last, and not intermingled with icy atoms that cut the cheek, ay, and even the leather of their dress, like a sandblast. Soon that ceased, and they could view the dreadful medley of the devastated country.
All the landmarks were removed, and the new ones were frightfully fantastic. Trees were stripped into logs, and flung upon the bluffs, and boulders were perched in the crotches of dismantled trunks. The grove where the hunters had been ambushed among the stumps, to succour the Half-breeds' captives, no longer existed even to the roots. No sound arose where no breathing creature remained. Four feet deep the snow and sleet spread as a blanched shroud over the level ground.